Introduction: Calamities

 Cheyenne Warriors demonstrates that a seemingly “small” story, long overlooked in studies of the American West and of the Plains Wars, is in fact a crucial narrative--at once dynamic, complex, and revelatory of vital social and political patterns of the 1850s. Set largely in and around Nebraska Territory’s Fort Kearny, Cheyenne Warriors exposes the tumultuous storms that fueled manifest destiny and empire building. The neglected series of violent events on the Platte River Road explored in this book serves, too, as both microcosm and harbinger of the furor soon to engulf the Great Plains, and thence shape profoundly the American West and United States Indigenous and emigrant American history.